Word: economisters
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...productive as Toyota's U.S. plants, yet Toyota has the advantage of not having to pay health-care bills for a small city of retirees, population 340,000. One GM worker supports 2.65 retirees, adding $1,100 in "legacy" costs to each American-made vehicle, says Sean McAlinden, an economist at the Center for Automotive Research. While the Japanese government pays for most Toyota retirees in Japan, GM shelled out $3.6 billion to pay for retiree health care just last year. GM's turnaround plan is a high-wire act: pushing up the launch of new pickups and SUVs, reducing...
...cases the acquisitions did not earn enough money for the company to justify the purchase price. In only six instances did the merger program seem to be a clear-cut success. Companies stumbled most frequently when they bought firms in a totally different industry. F.M. Scherer, a Swarthmore College economist who surveyed 6,000 mergers from 1950 to 1977, discovered that the profitability of most acquired companies slumped after they were taken over and that fully one-third of the conglomerate acquisitions of the 1960s were later sold. Says he: "We typically found managerial failure. The acquirers didn't know...
...disruptions that big mergers cause, many economists applaud them as a sign of a healthy and competitive economy. Acquisitions are "an important ingredient in a free-market system," says Northwestern's Rappaport. "There's no question that overall they're beneficial." Nor do economists really worry about all the firms in the U.S. eventually blending into one or two gargantuan companies. They note that new concerns are formed at an even faster clip than corporations are consolidating. So while the urge to merge will never end, says Yale Brozen, author of the 1982 book Concentration, Mergers and Public Policy, "that...
...world's shantytowns and slums represent the next big marketing opportunity for multinational companies. With sales growth harder to come by in a competitive world, enterprising companies are seeking expansion among the long-ignored lower classes. And it's about time, says C.K. Prahalad, well-known consultant and economist at the University of Michigan, who says these "aspirational poor"--people earning less than $2 a day who make up three-fourths of the world's population--could contribute an additional $13 trillion in annual sales to the global economy, if only companies would drill deep enough to reach them. "Nearly...
...Still, at today's prices, Lee isn't buying. Nor am I. After all, having missed the joyride so far, it's hard not to worry that the headiest gains have already been made. The most vocal doomsayer is Morgan Stanley economist Andy Xie, who has warned repeatedly?to the great misfortune of those who've heeded him?about an ominous oversupply of apartments and the government's halfhearted efforts to rein in speculation. For me, there's a particular terror of repeating my New York mistake: joining the herd moments before it runs off the cliff. But with Chinese...